Announcer 0:28
Hello, and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, John Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's John.
John Moore 0:49
Hello, everybody. Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon.
Hang on to your hats. Were talking about esoteric and exoteric spirituality in this episode. Why? Because they're cool. But also because I don't know, these are Greek terms that can be sometimes confusing. And so I'm gonna talk about the differences. And not that I'm, I'm not here to prescribe anything to anybody. As somebody who practices esoteric spirituality, myself, I'm not saying that's the right path for you. Do what you will. But if you have some information, you can make some informed choices, right? So let's talk about the difference. First of all, when I'm talking about esoteric, that is spelled e s, and when I'm talking exoteric, that spelled e x, they are Greek words, basically, meaning in our teachings, so meaning inner, and so meaning outer. So things that are exotic or foreign or outside of our experience, things that are, you know, exoplanet planets, or planets outside of our solar system, and et cetera, you get the picture. So generally speaking, in spirituality in some, I'm going to talk a little bit about organized religion, just because some of the easiest examples to understand, come from organized religion. However, I do understand that there's a large the law, in fact, the largest growing population in the US and many other countries is people who identify as spiritual but not religious people who aren't practicing organized religion, but are still spiritual. And wherever you find yourself, that's totally fine. But sometimes, it's just easier to point out some examples this way. But I'll also talk about I'll talk about what it might mean if you are spiritual but not religious. So generally speaking, historically, anyway, when we're talking about exoteric spirituality, we're talking about a church or you know, an organized religion, what are their outer teachings? What are the things that they're teaching to the masses? What are the practices, right? So if you were Catholic, for example, you would go to Mass you would practice mass you would do, you know, take communion, you would do confession, you would do all of these things part of the exoteric part of every day, church spiritual life exoteric with an x. Now, one might think there aren't hidden teachings in Christianity, there's no esoteric Christianity, but that is not true at all. There are lots of forms of esoteric In fact, in in all of the major religions of the world, not just the Western ones, but in all of the major religions of the world you find both exoteric and esoteric practices. So there are lots of Christian orders. There's some Catholic orders that have hidden inner teachings and inner practices. You find mystics gonna talk about mysticism, mysticism isn't always esoteric, from an organized religion perspective, but those things do kind of go hand in hand. So one of the you know, one of the characteristics, we'll talk about some common characteristics. Now common doesn't mean universal. Right? So if I say that esoteric practice usually involves some sort of initiation initiatory practice, he's a well, you know, the, you know, the Sufi school in, and I don't know if this is true or not, but the Sufi school in Islam doesn't have initiation. Like I said, it's common, it's not universal Sufis are do have esoteric practices, right, that is an esoteric form of Islam. In Judaism, you have the practices, practices and teachings associated with curbline. I know there. Now there's a lot of that out in the public a lot of stuff that was esoteric, hidden away, and occult, and we'll talk about the word occult as well is, in this age of information is available, is out there. You can, you know, take online courses and Cobla now that it was unheard of, until very recently, you the only way to learn would be to learn one on one from a teacher. In fact, the word my understanding of the word Kala in from in Hebrew, comes from the word like to, to whisper or to babble, meaning like its word, mouth to ear kind of teaching. So there's a lot of that there's a lot of an esoteric teaching, hidden stuff, because not a lot was written down. And so there are a lot of esoteric traditions that died out because they were either repressed or they just didn't have enough people to pass teachings on to. So in pagan Rome, for example, during around the time that, you know, just prior to the time that Christianity formed, you know, so a couple 100 years, BC, to a few 100 years ad, there was the cult of Mithras and mithraic. Religion, and we don't know very much about it, because they didn't write it down. But what we do know is that there were mithraic temples, which were underground, literally underground, hidden. Secret, we knew they were initiatory practices. There were at least three levels of initiation. I believe it was mostly open to men, but there may have been mithraic. temples that accepted women as well, there were feasts involved and rituals. And so it was very, it was esoteric, there were a lot of esoteric cults in the cult of Mithras was popular and seen actually as competition for Christianity during this time, because it was ongoing, and because of the number of myth mithraic temples found and found everywhere found you the UK, Europe, and lots of these have been dug up by archaeologists. And they can postulate that it was really popular, and that it was particularly popular with military people because they were located near where the Roman military was stationed. So not really, as much near sort of civilian populations. So popular with military people and, you know, involved the worship of Mithras and Sol and you know, they know a few things just because of the artwork found inside these mithraic temples. But the actual practices are, have been difficult to decipher so far, because they didn't write anything down. So very typically, esoteric practices are not written down. Again, not universal, common, right, because you can find books of Qabalah that are quite that are old, not ancient. Because the first ones written were written in, I think of the Middle Ages. So we don't have ancient Kabbalistic scrolls that I'm aware of. And the Middle Ages might seem old seems old to me, but in the scope of humanity not that old. So some things that are common in esoteric practices one there, there's usually a selection process or an or initiation, which has to do with the person passing the tradition on determining if the candidate is worthy or ready to receive the teachings. So we see this with things like Freemasonry, right? Freemasonry is ostensibly Christian.
And as esoteric and hidden, you have to be initiated into the practice, you have to be, you know, voted in and selected. And although many, many, many books have been written about Freemasonry and outlining the rituals, and there have been videos done, showing the rituals and things like that, it's actually part of the oath is that you swear never to write anything down. And that would reveal the secrets. But again, in this information, age, everything is available, pretty much. I'm sure there are. I'm sure there are lots of things out there that are not available. There are still probably oral traditions out there. that haven't been written down. But there are a lot of things in the Western world. And particularly, we are fond of writing and printing things and putting things on the internet. So there may be this idea that esoteric practice is better or higher level or getting to give you spiritual power, etc, etc. And, you know, I'm not going to be disingenuous, and say, none of that is true, it's all the same. But that doesn't mean, you know, you're going to be you know, seeking out esoteric practices to gain power, or that sort of thing is sort of the wrong motivation. Right. First of all, any, any initiation, any real initiation, any real spiritual initiation is going to be a minor death of sorts, meaning you're going to have to give up some old ways of thinking of doing things, whatever. So it's not for everyone. Right. I mean, even in exoteric practices, right, if you were to join a church that you hadn't belonged to before, they might have a certain code of conduct if you converted, pardon me, if you converted to Judaism, you converted to Islam, you would have to give up, you know, if you hadn't been living that way, you would have to give up some ways of living, for example, and decide that, that, whether that worked for you or not, if you join certain religious orders, you might be expected to be celibate, for example, though, I'm not sure how that works out in reality, I don't, I don't know that. There's a whole lot of that there's a whole lot of celibate orders that seem to have a lot of sexual abuse and stuff like that. So anyway, I'm being initiated into some sort of order or whatever, you know, puts a lot of expectation on you. It's an obligation. It's an, you know, frequently you're taking oaths, and in my take, oath should never be taken lightly, particularly spiritual oaths. Right? It is a contract of sorts, but it's a contract sound like a contract with the devil. You're not selling your soul to the devil. But it's a karmic contract, saying, I'm going to live out these certain principles. I'm going to do these certain things.
And if you don't, sometimes there are karmic repercussions for that. You sometimes the universe is like, Oh, well, I'm going to show you that. You
entered into something which was presented to you as life and death serious and you did not take it Life and Death seriously. And so here's an important lesson for you to learn. So, you know, don't go into esoteric spirituality lightly, particularly anything that's organized. So there's, there's also just like with any form of spirituality, there's organized esoteric spirituality, right, you can join the Freemasons, you can join, you know, certain orders, monastic orders and all kinds of things. You can receive initiations, you can receive transmissions, you can in, in, in Eastern religions, so Hinduism, Buddhism, things like that, there are now there you can get all kinds of transmissions from gurus, right, you can get things that used to only be open to mics, you can get all kinds of transmissions. But you, you know, so for if you're a, you know, if you're Buddhist, you want to go receive the, you know, some transmission of some Tibetan deity or something, you have to have taken certain vows certain, you know, taking the vows of refuge, for example, that's an expectation. And, you know, you're not to say, like, lightning is going to strike you down or something, but you're not going to get what you're after, by just going and getting a transmission, if you're not taking it seriously. So that's another aspect of esoteric practice it takes to get anything out of it takes a significant amount of dedication, practice, and, and faith for lack of a better term, right? If you just, you know, let's say, take the refuge vows in Buddhism, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha, I take refuge in the Buddha, is just like, throw that out there and you don't really mean it. Well, none of the other stuff you do is going to do anything for you. It makes no sense. Unless you're serious about that, unless you align yourself to that. So there's an alignment in esoteric practice as well. So there's organized esoteric practice and then there is sort of mysticism and mysticism is about more solitary, there are mystical orders, but mystical work is usually solitary because it is about individual absorption, identification with the divine. And you have mystics in every form of spirituality. So when I read something, an interview with somebody who is a Sufi dancer, if you've seen what they call the, I don't know if this term is used or not, but the Whirling Dervishes, right, that the Sufi dancers that spin in circles, really beautiful, actually to watch, they wear these outfits and they spin around and you can tell they're entering a state, an ecstatic state. And this is another Greek term IX stasis orcs. I don't know how you pronounce it in Greek, but it's stasis word, the word ecstasy from and ecstasy, not just talking about the way that we normally use it in English to refer to like, sexual ecstasy, but meaning entering this altered state where the personality sort of dissolves. But I was reading this interview and somebody asked about, you know, the Sufi dancer what it was like, and his experience of doing that whirling was like he was being held and spun by angels that were in the room. So he was no longer doing it that the spirit was doing the motion for him was moving him. Which to me as a shamanic practitioner, somebody who teaches and practices shamanism. We have very similar practices in shamanism where we merge with helping spirits and dance are merged with helping spirits and move merge with helping spirits and channel and talk and that sort of thing. So it's like we allow the body to become a vessel. And there's an expression in shamanism called becoming the hollow bone. If you think about a bone that is hollow, it's, you know, it's cleared out of any junk that might be in the middle. And it becomes a clear channel for spirit to move through. And that's, you know, that's what shamans do strive to become strive to become the hollobone, we do our self work
to clear out the junk that prevents us. And the junk is basically shadow material, ego, material, all kinds of stuff. So, there are mystical aspects in every form of spirituality as well. So shamanism, for example, is mystical, because it does involve, you know, the merging of the ego, or the identity, not the ego, but the merging of the identity with the divine sometimes. And it's also esoteric, because there are practices that are only available to people who are kind of initiated. Although I've certainly I've read things. I've read things in books about shamanism that I think I sort of wish. I wish people hadn't written down. So there are some really, really advanced practices that some people have written out. And my concern, not that, you know, we need to hold things back from people like that. But people will practice stuff that they're not ready for yet. And two things can happen when we do this. So, you know, like, right now you can go online and download a book on evoking demons. Right. And I can't tell you whether that's a good thing to do, or a bad thing to do. But historically, if you were going to do something like that, you would have gone through years of apprenticeship with, you know, some teacher, and you had done all kinds of work prayers and meditations in preparation for that work. Now, people are like, just let me get to the demons. No personal preparation, no personal work. So the same thing is true with shamanism, you have to do your own work, you have to work to become that hollow bone. And then you get to the esoteric practices, which so the challenge is that, a if you haven't done your personal work, this stuff is not going to work for you at all. Right? It's sort of like, I want to run, I want to run a marathon. But I'm not going to train for it. I'm just gonna go out and run a marathon tomorrow. One of two things can happen here. A, I will fail miserably. That will, that will definitely happen. But to depending on how hard I try, I might actually hurt myself. And that's a definite possibility as well. So it's the same thing with esoteric practices. There's usually a building up there's usually, which is why a lot of a lot of initiatory systems Slyke, Freemasonry and some others. Although a lot of the esoteric teaching, in my experience has been removed from Freemasonry, like there's a lot of stuff, talks about symbols and things like that. But there's not a lot of practical teaching in Masonic lodges. But we'll take something like the Golden Dawn if you're not familiar, the Golden Dawn was a magical body, a Christian magical body, not overtly Christian, not like a church but based on Judeo Christian stuff and loosely based on Freemasonry and they had, you know, there there are the original body closed, but there are now organizations teaching their systems of magic so it's very esoteric and it's initiatory. And, well, you could go in down their entire corpus of material. And practice, try to try to practice some of the advanced stuff. They're really caught there, like you have to go through, you know, at level one or whatever it's called, you've got to go through a year of training, where you do work every single day, preparatory work, you do meditations, you do rituals, you have to, you know, learn the Hebrew alphabet, you have to learn all of this stuff before you initiate to the next level. And then there's a bunch of stuff before you're gonna shave to the next level. But you could right now go online, probably download the highest level of Golden Dawn ritual and attempt to do some of the ritual, and it won't work for you. Why? Because you haven't done any of the preparatory work. You're going out and trying to run a marathon and you haven't trained for it. And you might hurt yourself spiritually, physically, mentally. And there are there are cases that I've seen of people
you know, people going, there's talk about like Kundalini sickness where people raise the Kundalini in their body without, without proper preparation, and essentially going insane. Right, and I don't, I don't know the truth of that. But I have seen, I've experienced people who were practicing things they should not have been practicing and winding up in rough shape mentally. They're opening doors without the muscular strength. Like if I went in, I tried to benchpress 500 pounds today. And I had somebody helped me lift, you know, a couple of people helped me lift the weight off the rack and then let go of it. I would hurt myself would probably kill myself, I don't know. 500 pound bar coming crashing down on the center of my chest. probably hurt myself. But people don't think about that stuff spiritually. Like, yeah, I can do anything. It's just spirituality. But here's the thing. You have an energy body that closely matches your physical body. This is what acupuncturist and energy healers work on. And there's some shamanic practices that work at the level of your energy body. And, you know, it has pathways, some, you know, called channels. Again, acupuncture, works on these channels, meridians, whatever you want to call them, recognized by a lot of esoteric systems, even energetic anatomy, you can overload that if you're not prepared. Just why systems of yoga are, tend to be gradual.
Because there's a tremendous amount of preparatory work, you have to, you know, prepare your energy system. Now, people in the West, a lot of a lot of people think of yoga as just the physical exercise part, right? And you can go to yoga studios, everywhere and get a workout. But that's not the intent of yoga. Yes, it works the body. Absolutely, you can get in fantastic shape by practicing hatha yoga or whatever. But Yoga is a spiritual practice in the physical exercises. The asanas are only one branch of many, right? And you might practice some pranayama, which is the breathing part, you might meditate. There's also bhakti yoga and karma yoga. And there's so many different kinds of yoga that don't necessarily involve just the physical postures. And I'm not an expert in yoga, so I don't want to speak too much about it. But you know, there is a gradual preparation of the energy body, the higher spiritual centers to be able to handle the amount of power that will flow through during higher level practices. um you know, Chi Gong is like that as well. So Taoist Taoist yoga. Right? Even though you know Yoga is not a term a Taoist term, but to put a Western spin on it, I guess in Taoism, there are lots of physical exercises to work the energy body to prepare the energy body to make it more resilient, to move things around. And you can go, you can go to a Tai Chi class, you can go to Qigong class, you're not going to learn the highest level practices right away. Why, because one of those two things will happen, one, it's not going to work for you, it's just not you're just not prepared. Just don't have the capacity to generate that much energy. Or to handle it, too, you could wind up hurting yourself, right? It's like I go to, you know, I trained in martial arts for for decades and decades. And so I was about five years old, five, or six anyway, trained in martial arts for a really long time. And, you know, train on my own. Now, these days, I used to teach. And it's like, people would, people would show up to class, you know, for the first time, and expect to be Bruce Lee, or expect to, you know, show me the most advanced techniques, I just want to learn, you know, techniques, I'm like, you can't even make a proper fist yet. You know, you can't get out of the way of a punch. And I'm just going to teach you, you know, vibrating palm strikes that can cause internal organs to explode. Even if I had the inkling to teach that to you. And they don't, there's, there's things that I refuse to teach some of the internal internal techniques that I learned, I would refuse to pass on, because there was no need for them. There were two, they were not self defense at that point. You know, hitting somebody and causing an Oregon to fail seven days later. which believe me is a real thing. That's not self defense. And so I found no need to ever pass that on to any students. Um, but even you know, people wanted to, you know, teach me the death touch, teach me this teach me that I'm like, Look, if you just, you know, if you just want to hurt people go pick up a toaster and hit somebody over the head with it. But here to train your body, mind and spirit. And yes, the techniques that I'm going to teach you can be used in self defense. But you got to train, you know, and I would it. Sometimes it was disheartening. I would teach a movement, for example, some small technique, and say, Okay, go go practice this technique, and send people off, and I go work with the student and they'd look and I'd see a bunch of students standing around and talking in the class. Which is a big no, no, in martial arts studios. You don't stand around and chat. So I go, I'm like, What are you guys doing? Like, oh, we're waiting for the next thing. Like, what do you mean? Like, Well, we did this, like, how many times we practiced it once? The like, what's the next thing? And like, well, you practice this movement for the next 10 years until you understand it. Most people don't have the patience for that. And that's fine. Understandably, we live in a world of instant gratification of everything available at our fingertips on the internet. But if that's not the kind of preparatory work you're trying to do, or you're willing to do or you're capable of, then esoteric practices of any kind be a martial arts or yogic or spirituality is probably not for you.
Esoteric spirituality does not impart supe you know, instant superhuman abilities on you. In fact, spiritual powers sidas in Sanskrit, you know people I've, I've experienced people doing things that would be considered supernatural. You know, and it's only for the fact that there were many other people witnessing the same thing that I witnessed, at the same time that I didn't think I was, had been drugged or hallucinating or whatever. I witnessed some things that were fairly supernatural, but people who are awakened will tell you that those powers are a bit of a trap along the pathway on the pathway to awakening, why, because people get fat, they get attached to those abilities. So there's a spiritual teacher, I never got to meet in person, but who I've, you know, I've followed his teachings and through his student who teaches them his name, or actually a couple of his students, his name is Lester Levinson, founder of the Sedona Method, I Sedona Method, I highly recommend for anybody, you can pick up the book, you can take a course you can. The book is really cheap on Amazon. Life changing stuff, really, really good stuff and not. It's presented in a very much not no spiritual baggage to it, right. Like I took some courses with them, I went to New York, and there was a rabbi in the course, for example. So it's not religiously based or anything like that. But according to his students, people say with them, Lester developed Lester Levinson, that person found this he developed a lot of abilities along his path as he was awakening, like stuff would just happen where he could, he could manifest stuff kind of at will. And he realized that that was a trap, like he could spend the rest of his life just fascinated by manifesting things. Right and he become attached to that in the Buddha teaches us that attachment is the source of suffering. And so what he did was he actually gave up his abilities, like you can, you can do that. You know, somebody who can levitate or you know, shape shift, or you know, whatever, let's say somebody has that ability, they can just decide to give that up. Okay, I'm done with that. And it goes away. And the person when they do that, they go deeper into source deeper into reality deeper into, and the description of that deepness is bliss, right. There's, you know, the Sanskrit word Ananda, which is bliss, but it's like perfect bliss. There's a date not to go too far afield here, but there's a Japanese deity called Fudo mu who is the unmovable one. And statues of him have him he's, you know, sitting and he has it looks kind of fierce and he's holding a club. And the idea is to have this image in perturb ability. Right to have a mind that is completely undisturbed by what's going on. Now, there's a lesson there. Right? There's a lesson in divine consciousness that it holds everything without being disturbed by it. And I'll give you I will give you a secret here. It's not a secret. A secret technique. One very powerful form of meditation is to sit and allow everything that's going on just to be exactly as it is to have no press difference. So if I sit and I look out the window and I see some garbage on the ground, that's fine. That's just an appearance that's showing up in my consciousness. They have no preference, no attachment to it, I don't care if it stays that way if it changes. But it's a practice of imperturbability. And that is one way of approaching the divine mind right and approaching the, the universal consciousness. Universal Consciousness holds everything it but is unchanging. And ultimately, this is what esoteric practice is aiming at. Most forms of esoteric practice most genuine forms of esoteric spirituality are gearing people up for you know, realization of Universal Consciousness might call it absorption into deity or, you know, oneness with God or whatever. Whatever terminology, it is Enlightenment awakening.
But a lot of people. So a lot of people aren't ready for that. It's a complete, it's a complete paradigm shift, right. And I don't use that term in a pop culture way. Your paradigm is your collection of beliefs about everything about reality. And it doesn't matter what that is, it's going to shift tremendously. So if your whole idea of reality breaks down, are you prepared for that? And then the other. The other question is, are you going into esoteric practice for the wrong reasons? This is not judgment, you're wrong. You're right. But it's more like, the reasons you're going into esoteric practice? Are they going to lead you to seek out the thing that is intended to be produced by those practices? Are they going to lead you to fail? So if I'm like, Well, I don't know. I'm going to use an extreme and silly example here. You know, let's say back in my back, and my single, this was never a thing for me. But back in my single days, if I said, I'm gonna practice esoteric yoga, because it'll make me more attractive to the ladies. Well, that's dumb, because it's not intended to do that. That's the wrong reason. Not that I'm judging the motivation to be more attractive to the ladies to be wrong, morally wrong or whatever. It's wrong because it's not going to do that. For me, it's not the intention. It might, who knows that might have that ability to some extent, but if I want to be more attractive to the ladies, I'm gonna, you know, go work out and pick out better cologne. It's much easier than spending 20 years of my life and meditation or, or whatever. So, if the reason is, you know, just curiosity, intellectual curiosity, you know, you that'll get satisfied, maybe, maybe get satisfied or maybe like, that's it. I can remember, many, many years ago, a very young adult. I was excited, like, I get initiated into a secret order of some kind. It's like, cool, I'm gonna learn the, you know, I'm gonna learn the secret word and blah, blah, blah, you know, secret password, all this stuff. And went through the initiation process and they're like, says the secret word. And they told it to me as like, that's it. I was literally my response. That's it. And, you know, looking back on that, I was like, Oh, I was silly young man. And I was only like, was after sort of the, the the outer aspects of the esoteric right what's can I do I have to I have a secret that other people do well, I feel special, there's a certain amount of I need to feel specialness going on there. I get that we all want to feel special and unique and like an insider and part of the club and all of those things
you know, and there are ways to do that, that are, you know, that are non, that are non spiritual as well. You know, join a civic organization, run for local office, join a club of some kind. But I think what I'm saying is esoteric spirituality is not easy, it's not an easy path to anything. It's not a shortcut, it may be the only pathway to certain things. But that doesn't make it easy. Right. If the only pathway to the top of a mountain is a you know, 600 foot sheer cliff, that doesn't make that cliff easy to easier to climb just makes it the only way to get to the top of the mountain
and also the coffee here. Coffee is a tool for higher consciousness, I realized that the coffee is not everybody's bag, but I do enjoy my coffee. So let's talk about the word occult a little bit. So the word occult literally means hidden. And so by definition, all occult practices are esoteric meaning they're not given out to the general populace. They are hidden. However, not not all esoteric practices would necessarily be considered a cult, for example. Generally speaking, you if you're practicing, you know, historically anyway, not today. But historically, if you were practicing things that were considered a cult, you would be doing it in secret. Because it's very risky. You couldn't be well you could be executed, tortured to death executed. In a lot of places, no matter what you were doing, you you know, certainly up until very recent history could be burned at the stake or tortured or thrown in prison for practicing, you know, consorting with spirits, etc, etc. So occult practices are all esoteric in that they are inner teachings frequently there are initiations and occult practices. However, there are a lot of people who practice a cold things solo because historically they have been, it was dangerous to practice with other people, although they would, you know, certain people would take on apprentices or whatever. And, you know, there are rich, very rich occult histories behind behind a lot of things. Today, the founding of the United States of America. The founding fathers were predominantly Freemasons. There are a lot of occult spiritual ideas hidden in the symbology and words and practices and things like that. Now, there is amongst many, even today, this idea that occult practices are devil or always devil worship or whatever, and that's just not true. There's a lot of Christian occultism. One figure to look at historically is Dr. John D. He was the court astrology or to Queen Elizabeth The first. So back in the Elizabethan days, he was an astrologer and Alchemist, a mathematician. He was a cryptographer, meaning he he wrote codes. He acted as a spy for Queen Elizabeth, he was a close confidant. And he was performing rituals, ostensibly. So his idea, a lot of his ideas actually led to the, what the modern world basically many things we have in the modern world, he coined the term the British Empire, for better or for worse, you know, we'll talk about imperialism too much, but you know, basically creating the, you know, setting England up as a superpower, it was not a very powerful country for, you know, for all of its history. He was working, supposedly, with angels, in order to bring about the apocalypse, the end, you know, the End Times, very apocalyptic. But he was, you know, obviously, he was practicing and secrets. And people didn't know about what he was doing until his diaries were discovered many years after his death. He was working with scryer. Also, you know, it's interesting, you can look at him from lots of different perspectives. This great book by Jason Lewis called John D in the empire of angels, very thick book, very well researched, well written. Jason leaves a really great author. But anyway, talks about, you know, in this book, he talks about how a lot of our modern ideas come directly from this one guy who was devoutly devoutly Christian practicing occult practices. So the Order of the Golden Dawn, again, in a very Christian, couple of very Judaic, I guess, you know, very Jewish, esoteric practices, Sufism, very Islamic. So although these are esoteric, there are, you know, occult practices mixed and there's magic basically. And de was not out to, you know, perform magic like to manifest a castle for himself or, you know, whatever he was really trying to, he was trying to communicate with, communicate with angels to bring about heaven on earth, which is basically the apocalypse, you know, the end times, but he wanted to set up, set England up as the ruler of the entire world with Queen Elizabeth the first as its head, as the Empress of the entire world. And he thought that's what God wanted him to do. And I'm not sure the in his diaries, he took meticulous notes in his diaries, the angels never told him that was what he was supposed to do. But that's what he thought he was supposed to do. So there's some controversy about it, because of the the person that he was working with at the time was, you know, not always the most scrupulous person. This guy Edward Kelly, which might not have been his real name, but he had been in trouble for coming confidence games before but these guys worked together for something like seven or nine years, basically every day performing complex rituals to contact these angels to the point where they were both seeing and hearing them now we could argue whether they were hallucinating whether he was being conned whether whatever, whatever whatever, but there is a calm Plex series of works base based on their findings that have influenced a lot of things and in what we consider modern thought. So one cannot you can't deny the influence you might not be aware of it. It's not like his name is on everything.
But yeah, he was an alpha mist and astrologer, scientist, highly educated, he had more books. In his collection books were books were very hard to come by, in those days, as one might imagine, very, very expensive things. And he had more books in his collection than the libraries of Cambridge and Oxford combined. They each had a couple 100 books. In their collection, he had several 1000 books in his collection. So imagine, you know, imagine having more, owning more physical books, then Harvard and Yale combined, give you some idea of how learned this man was. He was a polymath, he, you know, knew several languages he studied, he knew. So at that time, of course, there was only so much quote unquote, science that you could know, right science and mathematics, and stuff. You know, Isaac Newton and come along, and wherever else, he basically knew. All of the science there was to know in the western world at that time. All he had studied all of the math. And astronomy and astrology were basically the same thing at that time. All the math all the physical science, all that stuff. smart, smart, dude, true Renaissance man. And by the way, he would sign his letters to Queen Elizabeth in code. And the code was double Oh, look like a double oh seven. And that's where Ian Fleming got the the code for James Bond and his books. So really cool, dude, read up on him. If you get a chance, if you're into reading historic stuff, check out Jason lives, John Dee and the Empire of angels. It's good read, I have not completed it yet, I will have to admit, but the beginning parts are quite fascinating. And I think the end parts he goes on to talk about some of the more modern people that he influenced, such as Jack Parsons, who founded Jet Propulsion Laboratory. So there's a real mix of science and spirituality. In those days, they were not separate things. They were intimately linked. Somewhere along the line, we decided that science proved that spirituality isn't real and spirituality denies science, but I don't think that has to be the case or true. Anyway, hope that is a little bit enlightening on some of the differences between exoteric and esoteric practices and if you're considering esotericism in any way, you know, just be aware of what you're getting into. And go into it for you know, if you go into it for the right reasons, and you have the you know you the understanding that things take time, and initiations change paradigms and you won't be the same then you'll be okay. We're gonna leave you for today. I hope you're happy and healthy and I will talk to you real soon.
Announcer 59:05
You have been listening to speaking spirit with your host, John Moore. For more info or to contact John go to maineshaman.com That's maineshaman.com